


situational thanatology for extra credit

by zauberer_sirin



Category: Community (TV)
Genre: A LOT of Jeff Winger Feels, F/M, First Time, Future Fic, Jeff Winger Feels, Love Confessions, Quickies, Romance, Study Group Reunion, Wakes & Funerals, you don't need to have watched New Girl but it's an extra
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-20
Updated: 2020-08-20
Packaged: 2021-03-06 14:28:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26000437
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zauberer_sirin/pseuds/zauberer_sirin
Summary: It’s halfway through the funeral and he gets this unstoppable urge to shout “Stop being so dramatic, Leonard, nobody cares if you’re dead!” but he doesn’t — shout, because he does — care.
Relationships: Abed Nadir & Jeff Winger, Annie Edison/Jeff Winger
Comments: 24
Kudos: 128





	situational thanatology for extra credit

**Author's Note:**

> what is even this? i didn't even attempt to make it a COMMUNITY-style romp because that's beyond my skills. it's more like an indie movie.

**i.**

It’s halfway through the funeral and he gets this unstoppable urge to shout “Stop being so dramatic, Leonard, nobody cares if you’re dead!” but he doesn’t — shout, because he does — care, and he guesses even a funeral performed (and it is _performed_ , Leonard didn’t seem like the kind to leave excruciatingly precise instructions yet here they are) on Greendale grounds deserves the modicum of respect of Jeff Winger not blurting out self-centered panicked panegyrics in the middle of it. So he shuts up.

**ii.**

Abed slides up to him while Jeff is watching Elroy pocket half the buffet food in an ineffectively furtive manner (does he know the budget for this comes from the teachers’ paychecks, the Dean going “hey now Jeffrey” whenever he and Frankie tried to protest this decision, “Leonard would have done the same for you and your funeral oh hello Frankie I didn’t see you there” and no, he _wouldn’t_ have, that was Leonard’s whole point) while dodging the eternal “ _LinkedIn still a thing?_ ” question from friends and strangers.

“Funeral episodes are tricky ones, especially in sitcoms,” Abed warns him in front of some suspicious-looking jelly. It’s the color as well as the jiggling that is making Jeff suspicious. Unsurprising. Teachers’ paychecks are what they are. And there hasn’t been a good food poison scare in Greendale for at least three weeks.

“How so?” Jeff asks, as if continuing a conversation from yesterday instead of seeing Abed for the first time in, ouch, eight months.

Abed explains:

“They normally bring about the heavy guns, emotions-wise. Characters go through life-changing realizations. Normally some kind of tension is resolved, romantically. And you don’t look like you can handle the heavy guns today, Jeff. Emotions-wise.”

He knows that’s Abed’s way of being kind and Jeff finds it… well, kind. 

“Jeff, have you seen _New Girl_?” Abed adds.

Jeff is only mildly horrified that:

one) the answer is yes, of course  
two) he’s missed being asked questions like this

“Only the Megan Fox era,” he lies.

**iii.**

Who knew it would take someone who wasn’t actually friends with anyone in the group dying to bring the band back together? Even Buzz made an obligatory appearance for the service before disappearing, ditching them all in the middle of the wake, all mysterious and alluring, like a Spaghetti Western hero, fistbumping Britta as a way of general goodbye.

Leonard didn’t even like them; he most probably loathed the lot of them, so a part of Jeff feels ambivalent that this man’s death has served as a pretext for a Reunion with capital R of the study group, since Leonard probably wouldn’t have liked that. Another part of Jeff is like “Suck it, Leonard!”.

And another part of Jeff (huge, HUGE part) hates how easily everybody slips back into their old companionship, how conversations pick up easily and without awkwardness between them, and it’s not like one of these reboots or revivals that go horribly wrong and it’s just not the same even though the audience doesn’t want to admit it, because they wanted for it to be good so much (and Jeff is just paraphrasing Abed’s speech after _Gilmore Girls: A Year In The Life_ dropped but it applies here). This is not what 's happening. There’s no sad reboot here. Sure, they are older, but only in the sense most of them are way more attractive now than in Spanish 101. Jeff hates it because it makes him wonder why it can’t be like this every day. Why did things ever change? If even Shirley can take a couple of days out of her busy, ridiculous life and Troy can put his adventures on hold, if if if if... then what’s the point of it all. Make Jeff suffer? Even he is not that much of an egotist that he thinks the universe works with the sole purpose of making him miserable.

Well, maybe sometimes.

It’s still rude to be thinking that at someone’s wake.

“The service was very,” Annie starts, and then lowers her voice as if to say a dirty word, which tells Jeff that she is probably going to say anything but, “...denominational.”

“ _So_ denominational,” Britta says, nodding approvingly at Annie’s aside. Annie lights up.

“I thought Leonard was a Buddhist,” Troy comments.

Jeff resents that Shirley is missing this particular conversation, stolen away from the group by the Dean for a tour/hopefully-feedback of the new (and surprisingly compliant with basic hygiene standards, after all the food poisoning) cafeteria.

“He wasn’t a Buddhist,” Elroy says. “He created his own religion. A fake one, it didn’t even have a theogony, just a name. For tax purposes, the mad genius. That’s where the money is, Greendale should think about it.”

“No, no,” Frankie tells Elroy, and then she tells the room: “No no no no no.”

Pity, Jeff thinks, creating their own religion is one of the few things still left on the study group’s bucket list. But maybe Pierce’s unintended adventures on cult membership soured them all on the subject. He’s not that surprised, anyway — Leonard did change his name for a stupid election (“Suck it again, loser, the Rodriguez stays on the gravestone”). But whatever Leonard did, self-made religion or not, it doesn’t look like he got that much money out of it. Considering Greendale is paying for all this. Jeff wonders how much money he’ll have when he dies, makes a quick calculation about how much money he has in the bank right now versus how much money he had when he was a lawyer, just for fun.

Oh god he hopes Greendale doesn’t have to pay for his funeral, the Dean would declare National Jeff Winger Day or worse. Jeff Winger Week. 

There's a beat, with everybody looking appropriately sad or at least thoughtful.

There seems to be a lot of that today. Jeff hates it, too.

It makes him feel like he has to look sad, too. It makes him feel like a fake.

Then:

“Leonard paid taxes?!” Troy says.

**iv.**

“Oh it’s cold,” Annie sighs when she catches up with him outside the library, like she wasn’t expecting it. She should have. It’s February.

“Don’t you guys have cold in our nation’s capital?” Jeff asks, audibly bitter, he admits, and kind of lame.

“We do,” she replies, _audibly_ ignoring Jeff’s jab, disgustingly grown-up, if you ask him. “But it’s different.”

She’s wearing the only tasteful attire of the evening ( _the leather’s black_ Britta had shrugged off Jeff’s silent judgement; predictably enough, that was the Dean’s very excuse) and of course leave it to Annie to own a black cardigan. The dress looks a bit too thin for the weather and Annie hugs herself as she stares at the dull Colorado night. It occurs to Jeff that she doesn’t have to be here at all. None of them, really, but Annie even less so.

“You didn’t have to skip Quantico for this,” he tells her.

Her mouth curls into a sad smirk.

“Of course I had to. Come on, Jeff, it’s Leonard.”

“Exactly, _it’s Leonard_ ,” he points out.

Annie chuckles and Jeff finds himself chuckling along with her and the Colorado night is a little less dull. If he looks hard enough the stars are even a little bit pretty.

“You didn’t have to be here,” he repeats. “But I’m happy this is another thing we disagreed on.”

Annie makes an _aww_ noise and clicks her tongue.

“You’ve gone soft,” she says. “I like it.”

She gives the idea a little nod, confirming her approval. She sounds so self-assured Jeff can barely stand it. Not because it doesn’t look good on her — boy does it look good on her and he hates himself for being so stuck on this, after all this time, he could win (or lose, depending on how you see it) a thousand Debate Championships based what he still feels for Annie — but because he knew, _he knew_ , she was always much more confident and wiser than he was and she was always going to find out, sooner or later.

Then he watches her make a complicated face. 

“What? _What?_ ” He means what have I done now. Because he knows that face.

Annie shakes her head and lets a little moment go by before speaking again.

“Hey, I never said but… thank you for keeping up with my emails. I didn’t know if you were going to.”

He wasn’t so sure himself, at first. When she first left. It was more painful to read her emails than it was not knowing what was going on in her life. 

But he did. He dutifully replied to all the emails and chats and even let Annie send him voice messages she recorded while running late for her morning instruction at the FBI Academy (and no, he can’t believe her life either), a coffee in one hand, the other holding the phone while she spoke to Jeff about her neighbor Charlize’s cat breaking-and-entering through the fire escape the previous night and eating the snacks on her kitchen table (“ _no, Jeff! Charlize is the cat’s name, not my neighbor’s_ ” she would clear up in their next chat). And who leaves voice messages, anyway? He must be mad to write her back after that.

He must be mad.

“Eh, it’s something to do during class,” he says.

“As opposed to teaching,” Annie points out. Funny, there’s nothing of the old recrimination of the Annie Edison who would look at him like he is a bad, bad boy and she is so disappointed. Now she just looks amused. Like she knows he actually spends around 58% of his classes teaching. Jeff doesn’t think the students are going to miss much, if one random day he were to dramatically announce he’s quitting.

And of course he has been replying to Annie’s emails because he’s a fuck-up but there’s no way he’s that much of a fuck-up that he doesn’t try to keep whatever trace of Annie Edison he can, in his life.

**v.**

Of course, because he is Jeff Winger, the next thing he does after that conversation with Annie is start drinking as much as he can. He knows this move will disappoint at least 3.5 people in the room, but hey.

It is a wake.

It’s what you’re supposed to do at wakes.

And this is coming out of his paycheck anyway.

“It’s coming out of my paycheck anyway,” Jeff argues when he notices Frankie’s robot face is making a judgy robot face at him.

“I know this must be very hard for you,” Frankie says, tone slow and patient, and it sounds like something Britta would say, but without the gloating, so it’s actually a lot easier to swallow from Frankie. Because 0.5 of Britta draws comfort from Jeff being so fucking predictable.

“For me?” he wonders out loud. “Frankie, what do you — ?”

But she’s already gone, the designated driver even when there’s no driving, leaving Jeff so she can check up on an even more unruly child of hers. How disappointing we are to women, Jeff muses, scotch-bold, as he watches Frankie navigate the Dean’s wildly swinging funeral mood. Some people really _don’t_ need drugs, they’re naturally that feeling, Jeff resents, as he watches the glint twinkling out of his glass when it’s empty. He’ll say this, though: the Dean looks good in black leather aaaaaand yes, it’s time to cut it with the scotch, Jeff.

He leaves his glass and goes to hide in the bathroom.

**vi.**

Leonard wasn’t even a friend.

In fact, if anything, he was closer to an enemy.

If their roles were reversed Leonard would probably be laughing at Jeff’s funeral.

Jeff is not sure what is going on with him.

The moment he sees himself in the mirror he sobers up, completely and as quickly as he gulped down those glasses of scotch. Has he looked like this all day? No wonder Frankie was so worried. He splashes water on his face, but his skin feels hot like he has a fever. Get yourself together, Winger, he tries to pep-talk himself, but there is little evidence it succeeds by the time, two minutes later, Annie pushes the heavy door and steps into the bathroom.

“Jeff,” she calls, sounding like she both expected to find him here and is somehow baffled by his presence.

He doesn’t even question why she is in the men’s bathroom, or why she isn’t doing something Annie-like like be extremely uncomfortable to be standing in the men’s bathroom.

“I saw you— “ and her voice trails off, stopped by whatever she sees in Jeff’s face.

He turns away. To stop that sort of thing. Her looking at his face. Her looking at him. If he turns away long enough maybe Annie will magically disappear from the men’s bathroom. She cranes her head to one side, trying to see Jeff’s face, her neck twisted like she’s some kind of bird.

“Are you _crying_? Did you hide here to _cry_?”

“No!” Jeff says, very pointedly, very offended. Sure, Annie is technically right (only technically! they’re silent, manly tears!) but it’s rude to say it out loud.

At least she has the decency not to repeat it. She just stands there in her impossibly sensible attire, looking at Jeff with big, concerned eyes. He knows that face. It’s the face Annie has right before _Jeff_ says something he’ll regret.

“I’m going to die,” Jeff says.

Oh.

Oh, so he did know what was going on all along. Take that, Frankie and 0.5 of Britta!

Annie rolls her eyes. That kind of hurts.

“Well, _duh_ , Jeff. But not today,” she says.

Oh well.

That’s inconvenient.

As inconvenient as Annie grabbing his shoulders and pushing him inside the nearest stall. At least the toilet lid is down and _that’s convenient_ when Annie sits him down and her mouth starts kissing Jeff’s and sucking the air out of his lungs and all the brain cells from his head.

Before he has time to say “ouch”, because his ass colliding with the toilet lid so unceremoniously really hurt, Annie is straddling his lap, sitting on him without even breaking the kiss, industrious Annie Edison with the clever, hungry lips. Jeff might be getting distracted from the problem. Because the problem is _everything_. The Problem is kissing Jeff right now and Jeff is kissing the Problem back and that’ll teach him not to head Abed’s warnings about tv shows and he has the feeling he has had this epiphany before.

“Jesus, Annie, what — ?”

Whatever he is about to say dies in his mouth (dies, is dead, like Leonard) when Annie drops her hand to his crotch.

He was so wrong, there were still some brain cells left in his head. He knows there were because now those are _fried_. Jeff has enough trouble trying (&failing) not to be obliterated by Annie’s kisses, how come there’s _more_ to it, how come she keeps doing more stuff to him.

And he wants to say more on the subject, utter more expletives, for sure, but whenever he tries to say something that isn’t Annie’s name it gets stuck in his throat like the suspiciously sandy jelly they’ve been serving at Leonard’s wake.

The wake.

Oh, right. Someone’s dead. Someone he knew is dead, so Jeff twists one hand into Annie’s tasteful cardigan like he needs an anchor and he thinks “pretty dress” when Annie bunches it around her waist, pushing her underwear to one side and — 

Someone is dead _and_ Jeff is having sex, definitely having sex, with Annie, full penetrative sex on Greendale premises.

Who saw this coming? Okay, so maybe everybody saw this coming — or almost everybody; Chang probably assumed this had happened already, but this hasn’t happened before, and this has never happened to Jeff Winger before and _this_ is an entirely different _this_ to having sex in a bathroom stall.

This is — 

“Annie?” he utters with some difficulty, because his mouth is still full of her mouth, his body surrounded by hers.

“Shh,” she murmurs in reply, moving her mouth to his jaw, and then the side of his neck.

It’s very soft and sweet and comforting and unlike the drama of shoving him into a bathroom stall without warning. It’s also very unlike sex is supposed to be, if you ask Jeff. Which is not really a bad thing (as if sex with Annie could ever be a bad thing). Annie moves her body over him and Jeff loosens his grip and is now caressing the fabric of the black cardigan like it’s the most fascinating thing he’s ever touched in his life. And then — _wow_ — he starts moving with her.

It seems to go by in a moment, but also it seems to stretch for hours, so Jeff has no idea how long they are at it — historically he can hazard a guess, but he hopes he’s wrong.

And eventually it ends like it started: with Jeff none the wiser about what the hell is going on.

A soft sound leaves Annie’s lips; Jeff doesn’t think she’s come, but it seems enough for Annie to be satisfied to declare this an ending, she shifts her weight a bit, while Jeff hurries to hide himself in his pants and zip up, feeling a lot more embarrassed by his exposed dick than Annie seems to be. She’s still on his lap, happily straddling him and holding him against a dirty toilet, while she catches her breath. Holding Jeff while they both catch their breath.

She slaps his shoulder, friendly.

“Hey, you’re not as bad at sex as Britta says,” she declares.

Jeff wants to be offended but — he’s mesmerized instead, by Annie’s easygoing demeanor. Is she really okay with this? Who is this person he just had (not bad!) sex with? Jeff doesn’t want to sound like a douche but he knows Annie must have had romantic expectations, about what having sex with him might be like, romantic fantasies, and that was part of why Jeff was so scared of taking The Annie Thing seriously, because then he would have had to do _something_ about it and he couldn’t disappoint Annie like that, anyone else, fine, but not Annie, he just couldn’t bear it. Because he would have — disappointed her.

But now Annie is sitting on his lap in a toilet stall after what can only be described, much to Jeff’s mortification, as “a quickie” and both her and Jeff know exactly how much the Dean spends on cleaning these and Annie looks… _relaxed_. Amused, even. Not disappointed. How is that possible? Has she changed so much? Or maybe, a better explanation is that she has grown out of whatever she ever felt for Jeff, she grew up and grew old and so now there are no romantic expectations, or romantic anything.

Which would be, uh, pretty inconvenient for Jeff.

Because — 

“What now?” he asks her.

Annie gives him a serious, but unreadable, stare.

“You’re Jeff Winger, you’re going to come up with some long, grandiose Jeff Winger Speech that will explain away what just happened here between us.”

 _Now_ she sounds disappointed. She sounds preemptively disappointed.

Jeff feels a childish desire to confound her expectations. You don’t know everything about me! he wants to shout. Nobody does. He’s not predictable. He could change. People should just stop assuming he’s gonna — 

“I do have a speech,” he says, jaw set and staring straight back at Annie. “But it’s not grandiose. And it’s short. Very short. _Extremely_ short.”

Annie scrunches up her face, nose adorably wrinkled, and Jeff has a flash of this very same expression when she was trying to figure out who had taken her gel grip purple pen. He remembers that after so many years, uh? He must be mad.

“Like… three-words short?” Annie offers in a small, hopeful voice.

Jeff nods.

He doesn’t want to mess up the meaning with words, so he says none. Funny, words used to be his whole thing. 

Annie slaps his shoulder. Friendly again but this time — hard. Hey.

“Hey!” he protests.

“Hey!” Annie mimics, but there’s such fondness in her eyes when she stops frowning at Jeff and just looks at him. “That was a sneak attack.”

“You’re one to talk!” he throws back at her, gesturing between their bodies, at Annie still sitting on his lap.

Annie blushes — furiously. Which is profoundly unfair of her, Jeff thinks, because:

one) she was the one who decided to ravish him in a toilet stall! in a _Greendale_ bathroom!! not the other way around!!!  
two) cute

**vii.**

He knows what she meant when she said it was cold outside tonight. But Jeff appreciates it right now, because the sharpness of it helps him focus, helps him think. Numbers, he’s calculating numbers. Not the number of miles from here to D.C. or the number of hours it would take to drive there. He knows those numbers by heart (ha! and why does the “ha! in his head sound like Annie’s voice? he knows why), it’s new numbers that worry Jeff right now.

Numbers like how much time is left on the lease of his apartment. Or how expensive the clause that allows him to break it before its term. Does he know a good property lawyer? He must know someone. And a cheap moving company. How much stuff does he own anyway? Not enough. Too much, right now. It’s just stuff. How much did it cost? How much money would he really lose if he just left it behind?

He’s so caught up in numbers it takes him a few seconds to realize he’s not alone on the stairs to the library.

“Everything okay, Abed?” he asks, getting out of his head for a moment, because he might be a fuck-up and he might have been technically and wonderfully assaulted in a bathroom ten minutes ago, but still, it’s Abed.

“Okay,” Abed replies, in a hesitant manner that tells Jeff he is not lying and that’s a relief.

“So why are you here alone?” Jeff presses. 

“Troy is back there, telling everybody about his latest adventure in Bulgaria,” Abed explains.

Bulgaria? When did he leave South America? Jeff wonders. He really needs to pay more attention to Instagram tags instead of mindlessly replying with random emojis to whatever globetrotting drama of Troy’s shows up on the screen. Anyway isn’t it high time Troy stopped said globetrotting and came home? It’s been _years_. Come home for real come home, not just a funeral. Though Jeff has a newfound respect for funeral reunions.

“And you’ve already heard all about it?” Jeff guesses. He knows about Abed’s and Troy’s 24-hour Zoom calls where they line up wildly differing time zones so they can go to bed at the same time and leave the camera streaming while they sleep. It’s gross and Jeff is kind of jealous. It must be nice to have someone who sleeps better when you’re there, even if “there” is the digital illusion of closeness across continents we’ve all been sold by app developers. But he digresses.

“Multiple times,” Abed says. “But it’s not that. It still stings to hear him talk about stuff I wasn’t there for.”

“I know what you mean,” Jeff says. He still hasn’t seen Abed’s latest film — much to Annie’s scandalized _It was in Sundance, Jeff! Robert Redford’s Sundance_ and hey look, he is not proud of this. He will get around to watching it soon, he promises. Probably.

It occurs to him that maybe Abed wants to be alone right now.

But Jeff _doesn’t_ — okay, he wants to be a good friend, but there’s something itching under his skin, something fighting to get out.

“I’m quitting,” he tells Abed, oblique enough that it could mean anything.

It could mean anything to himself, still. Even though it could only mean one thing from the moment Annie Goddamn Edison decided to take a couple of days off from the FBI to visit her old college for the funeral of someone who was never her friend. It’s a mouthful but it’s true.

Turns out _he is_ predictable.

Just not in the way everybody assumed.

Almost everybody; Abed is nodding to the icy February breeze, something in the gesture like Jeff is telling him old, old news.

“When?” he simply asks.

“Tonight,” Jeff decides right on the spot. He’s suddenly in a hurry. He knows how many hours on the road it will take. Hell, Chang can take his apartment if he wants. Frankie and Britta can mail his things, the girls deserve their _I told you so_. “As soon as the Dean stops pestering Shirley.”

“Warned you,” Abed says. “Funeral episodes. There’s an art to them.”

Jeff looks into the distance, dark Colorado winter sky with the almost pretty stars and all and he feels like he’s in one of those Sundance-bound movies, yes, Robert Redford’s Sundance, where little plot happens and the actors all pretend they are so unattractive and deep just because they wear sweaters and the soundtrack is by Broken Social Scene or some other hipster band and Jeff is still calculating the cost of breaking his lease, the cost of gas in this economy, and fuck he’s so scared, scared of missing Greendale, he’s more scared of not ending up like Leonard than of ending up like Leonard, scared of change mostly. 

But what else is new?

Right. Not letting that fear stop him is what is new.

He can’t back out now. He made a speech. Fine, he _implied_ a speech. But it was his best Jeff Winger Speech ever, he thinks

and he thinks, boldly, emboldened, _you know what?_ and Abed would be so proud to hear this but _I think I did pretty okay for a funeral episode_. In fact, he’s done so well that he can proudly declare, and don’t tell Abed he’s made this reference, “Nick Miller’s got nothing on me”.


End file.
